Achieving Multichannel Marketing with Amazon Pinpoint - Segment Delivery and Campaign Analytics
Pinpoint centrally manages email, SMS, and push notifications and builds automated delivery flows with dynamic segments and journeys. This article explains techniques for maximizing campaign effectiveness with A/B testing and ML-based send optimization.
Overview of Pinpoint
Amazon Pinpoint is a service for planning, executing, and analyzing multichannel marketing communications. AWS has announced that it will stop accepting new customers starting May 20, 2025, and will end support for Pinpoint on October 30, 2026. It centrally manages five types of delivery channels: email, SMS, push notifications, voice messages, and custom channels. While SES specializes in transactional email (order confirmations, password resets), Pinpoint handles marketing campaigns (promotions, retention, re-engagement). It manages data centered on endpoints (users' devices and email addresses), and you can narrow down targets by combining user attributes, behavioral history, and location information. Unlike the topic-based broadcast delivery of SNS, Pinpoint focuses on delivering messages tailored to individual users.
Segments and Journeys
Dynamic segments are defined by filter conditions based on user attributes and behavioral data. You create segments such as "users who have used the app within the past 30 days and have no purchase history" or "iOS users living in Tokyo aged 25-34" and make them campaign targets. Import segments let you bring in external data from CSV or JSON files and integrate it with CRM or DWH data. A journey is an automated delivery flow that branches according to user behavior. You build scenarios such as "app install → welcome email → tutorial notification after 3 days → discount coupon after 7 days if no purchase → thank-you email upon purchase" in a visual editor. At each step of a journey, you can set wait times, conditional branches, and random splits (A/B testing), and the delivery content branches according to how users respond.
Analytics and A/B Testing
Pinpoint's campaign analytics dashboard displays the number of sends, delivery success rate, open rate, click rate, and conversion rate for each channel. In A/B testing, you compare variations of the message subject, body, send time, and channel. You can also build a custom analytics pipeline that delivers the event stream to Amazon Data Firehose (formerly Kinesis Data Firehose) and analyzes the event data accumulated in S3 with Athena or Amazon Quick Sight (formerly Amazon QuickSight). Pinpoint's ML-based intelligent delivery feature predicts the send channel and send time for each user from past behavioral patterns.
Pinpoint Pricing
Pinpoint pricing is pay-as-you-go by channel. Email costs approximately $1 per 10,000 messages, with a pricing structure equivalent to SES (as of August 2026). SMS is charged per use according to the destination country: approximately $0.07451 per message for Japan and approximately $0.00645 for the US. Push notifications cost approximately $1 per 1 million messages. Up to 5,000 targeted endpoints per month are free, and beyond that the charge is approximately $0.0012 per 1,000 endpoints. Running a journey itself incurs no additional charge, but messages sent from a journey are subject to per-channel pricing. If you refine segments to narrow down the send targets and reduce unnecessary sends, you can keep costs down.
Optimizing Delivery Timing and Managing Frequency
For marketing messages, not only the content but also when they are delivered affects their effectiveness. There is a view that delivering messages during the hours when users tend to respond makes them more likely to lead to opens and actions. You can also use a mechanism that estimates, based on past response data, when each individual is likely to respond and delivers messages at that time. At the same time, delivery frequency is important. Sending too many messages burdens users and may lead to unsubscribes or messages being ignored. If you space out deliveries and narrow down the messages you send, it becomes easier to maintain your relationship with users.
Summary
Amazon Pinpoint is a service for planning, executing, and analyzing multichannel marketing campaigns. It builds automated communication flows with dynamic segments and journeys and uses the results of A/B testing and intelligent delivery as material for increasing message effectiveness. With a custom analytics pipeline that uses Amazon Data Firehose, you can also perform analyses separate from the standard dashboard.
References (Official AWS Resources)
The primary sources for this page are the official AWS website and documentation. Check the official pages below for the latest specifications and pricing.
- Amazon Pinpoint official page
- Amazon SES official page
- Amazon SNS official page
- AWS Documentation (official)
If this page and the official documentation disagree, treat the official documentation as authoritative.